


history repeating

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Coulson's Daddy Issues, Cuddling & Snuggling, F/M, Future Fic, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-25
Updated: 2015-03-25
Packaged: 2018-03-19 12:04:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3609444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His father was on the Index. He's never really told anyone until now. He wasn't exactly planning on telling Skye.</p><p>(COMPLETELY JOSSED BY 2x14)</p>
            </blockquote>





	history repeating

**1.**

It's not that it's hard carrying a secret like that. He's been doing it for so long that sometimes he forgets about it. He could go an entire day, or days, without thinking about it.

Nobody knows, so nobody asks.

It's been decades since he said the words out loud.

"Not exactly how I pictured visiting your hometown," Skye says.

Trying so goddamn hard.

Coulson drops his gaze.

"So you are up to date with everything?"

"Yeah. I'm sorry my father is a dick."

Coulson nods.

He's read Andrew's evaluation. Nothing new. But Andrew figured out what took Coulson weeks, back when Skye first joined the team. Nothing in that report is news to him; the humor, the trauma, the desperate need to keep everybody safe. Coulson knows all of that. He had been expecting a solution.

(There's no solution; he knows this since he was a kid. You either live with this, or you die. He was hoping for a less painful option for Skye.)

He tries not to look at her hands.

He didn't understand what he saw, back in that field. _She passed out from the pain_ Simmons told him and something inside Coulson broke away and disappeared forever with those words.

If he keeps looking at her hands he will never find a solution.

"Are you okay?"

He lifts his gaze.

"That's a weird question for you to ask me," he says.

Skye prods a bit at her cast. Some of the bruises on her fingers are the same color. Coulson does not stare. He can't allow himself to. He's not the one in pain – so he is not allowed to suffer with her.

"You look like you've seen a ghost, and you are doing that thing with your hands," Skye tells him, raising an eyebrow.

He didn't realize. He knows what she is talking about (alarmed she knows this about him). He stops.

"How do you feel?" she asks.

Dark blue. 

Dark blue bruises.

Stop that.

"I don't know," she replies, sounding more sincere than she has been in days. There's no fake hope or cheerfulness here. "What's the plan? Simmons said they could give me some – stuff, to keep me calm so I don't hurt myself."

He shakes his head. The idea is too unsettling, as is Skye's willingness to go down that road. "That's not a long-term solution."

"No," Skye agrees. "It seems May's lessons haven't helped either."

She shrugs. 

Andrew's report said something about wrong tools to achieve a goal. About habits set long before Skye learned from May to push emotions down. Habits learned in childhood. It's not that easy letting go of those, they are engraved on the inside.

"I honestly don't know what to do," Coulson admits. It almost chokes him, the enormity of that confession.

She nods, hugging her knees, wincing when it hurts her hands.

Coulson can't look at her.

He needs to find a solution.

 

 

**2.**

He is about to tell her then, the whole story.

He's afraid she'll believe that's the reason he's making this personal.

(maybe; or maybe it's personal because _it's her_ ; or maybe it's cosmic intervention and fate, like Lady Sif said)

Skye leaves before he can decide.

(She has to.

It's also his fault.

It's for the better.

But it's also his fault.)

 

 

**3.**

The story is a well-known family romance. The kind you always tell in reunions, to new friends.

"It's like the universe wanted us to be together," Coulson's father always said.

Coulson doesn't remember much of him, but he remembers that quote.

Because his parents' first date was the same night a chunk of the Sputnitk IV fell on the town. They took it as a sort of cosmic blessing on their courtship and two years later Phillip was born. Because nothing much ever happens in Manitowoc, so it had to be a sign.

His mother was one of those invisible women of the era. Working in her father's grocery store and going to secretarial school at night but at twenty-three and with her younger sisters married she was beginning to settle for spinsterhood. Coulson's father entered her life like a miracle.

Skye calls him from a payphone.

"I haven't used one of these in years," she says.

It's not that long since she left and Coulson thought he was beginning to forget how her voiced sounded – or maybe he just thought he'd never hear it again. That was an absurd idea, of course, but he's an absurd person.

"Where are you?" he asks.

"Freezing my ass off, that's where I am."

Old Skye voice. Warm and defiant, like nothing could ever bring her down.

It sounds late there wherever she is, and Coulson tries to calculate distances based on time zones. He shouldn't do that.

"Skye."

"No, listen, I'm not telling you where I am," she says, no jokes.

"Okay."

There's a beat. He fears losing the connection. It sounds too fragile.

"I just wanted to let you know I'm okay. I'm alive and safe – I haven't hurt anyone."

"That's good."

"I just, I didn't want to worry you or anyone."

"I'll tell the team."

"Are things okay on your end?"

Coulson wonders if he should burden her with that the team is going through.

His whole world is falling apart, and he just wants to hear her voice.

"We're managing."

"Good."

There's a beat. Coulson wants to apologize for how things ended up between them. For not being able to find a solution.

He hasn't, so far. Apologized. He's not one for that. 

"Have you found what you were looking for?" he asks her.

Another pause.

He can hear the soft humming of traffic. He imagines Skye, standing in the middle of some lost town, in the clothes he last saw her in.

"I've found some people," says. "They are helping me. In a way."

A solution.

Something he could never found.

Not then, not now.

"Coulson, are you still there?"

"Yea – _yes_."

"Coulson, listen to me."

"I am."

"I need you to stay safe," Skye says. "Okay?"

"You don't have to worry about us."

"But I do," she replies hurriedly. "Coulson..."

His world is falling apart and all he wants is to hear her say his name.

Something shifts, like Skye is about to say something tremendously important. Coulson feels he can hear the warm breath against a cold night, wherever she is.

"Yes?" he says, a bit dreamily.

But that breaks the spell.

"I've got to go," she says.

"Yeah."

The line clicks and dies.

The fragile connection gone.

 

 

**4.**

He doesn't say "here's the whole story".

There is never such a thing as the whole story.

He was a golden boy, born at the end of the Depression to old parents who thought they'd never have children (he would have had an older brother but that baby died in infancy). A late life blessing, his parents dotting on him. He wasn't particularly good at sports – which is ironic, but you don't need to be a good athetle to take care of the local football team, specially if the high school is in a pinch. He has handsome behind his thick-rimmed glasses – he put the glasses away when he coached the team, to avoid students picking on his nerdy look. He was a young teacher and a young father, and his marriage, a permanent job and his only child arrived just in time so that he never had to worry about Vietnam (his students did, though).

His own father had been a teacher, some sort of family tradition. Mathematics, though. The son (Coulson't father) wasn't so dedicated. History suit him. He was smart, he passed through college like a breeze. But he became the kind of teacher his father – who taught in university, not high school – could never be, warm and friendly and charismatic. Academia didn't suit him, but real life did.

Phil Coulson's father was a dedicated teacher who took his pupils on field trips and spend more time with them than with his own son.

Coulson's own childhood was filled with noise and people; student-players coming over in the evenings and weekends, looking for advice or penitence.

Skye doesn't ask what's the point of all this family story.

She listens, sitting on her bunk. Patiently. She's been back with the team for less than a whole day; she came back powerful and changed, magnificent. A new haircut, too, shorter. She looks older. She looks good. Coulson decided she should know the whole truth.

"Go on," she tells him, when there's a pause in his story.

Coulson himself knows he's not one for talking. Maybe because he his life out of talking, his whole job, the last years in SHIELD had been just that: going places and talking to people like he was some kind of itinerant salesman, talking to strangers, convincing them that no, of course that wasn't an alien object they found and it was government property in any case so could they return it please. Just the bare hint in his tone there will be no "please" next time. He talked and talked and talked for a living. To his girlfriends he told bad jokes and nothing of importance about himself. After all day talking on behalf of SHIELD it's like there was nothing left for himself.

And now he is talking to Skye.

Skye who is not judgemental but who righteous, Skye who is kind but clear-eyed, Skye who is frightening but with whom Coulson feels safe. Perhaps he's talking now because he thinks that Skye's deserves it, or rather he owes it to her. Starting with the big things.

"You're father was on the Index. Wow," she says. He had been expecting one or two _wow_ s from her. He almost smiles. "Why didn't you tell me?"

He has many answers to that one, actually.

"How did it feel like, losing control?" he asks Skye, because he could never ask his father. "I've always wondered."

"Coulson, you carved the walls. You know what losing control feels like."

She's right, of course.

"But I felt nothing. What do _you_ feel?"

"Fear, mostly," she replies. "Have you ever gone swimming in the sea?" Coulson nods. "When the undertow pulls you under the water and you think you are going to drown, for sure. Except you don't drown, and you discover that's _way worse_."

Skye has always been good with words and Coulson remembers that was her job too, for years. She lived on words, her voice in messages in a bottle. Some of them ended up reaching him, funny enough.

His father talked a lot – Coulson was a rapt audience as a kid, at dinners and during car drives. His father knew all sorts of stuff, not just about history, he was a chaotically curious man. He read Captain America comics and the Journal of Science. People said he was so thin because he was always talking during meals, instead of eating. Coulson's mother was in awe of him, too, like her son, and a part of her was always intimidated by all his education, when she slaved away in her typist job, trying so hard not to make any spelling mistake.

After the accident, it would be easy to go to the Jekyll and Hyde commonplace to explain it. It would be easy to understand Coulson's lack of sympathy for Bruce Banner's situation. You could argue it was an accident as well, but not like his father was an accident.

"It must have brought up some stuff, seeing me lose control like that," Skye says, after he sort of finishes explaining.

"That's why I was glad I never told you until now," he replies. There's more of course. "But my father was the opposite. When he lost control he hurt people. You'd do anything but."

She nods very slowly.

"What happened to him?"

"SHIELD put him down."

Her eyes go very wide.

"That's messed up."

She is going to use that word a lot.

And because kids are like that Coulson always thought it was somehow his fault – that he could have done more, find a solution. "It's not your fault," Nick Fury told him. It's only nine years after it happens that Coulson gets the whole story from him.

The whole story is always relative.

"That's why you joined SHIELD?" Skye asks.

That's why they came for him. At seventeen he was a little screwed up and Fury felt it was his responsability to fix that. A solution to a decade-long problem. And yes, it was messed up, before Skye says anything, going to work for the people who had killed his father. And first he didn't even consider it seriously, how could he. But he didn't have many options. That's what SHIELD does. And he had his mother to think about. Saying Yes was easy. It should have been harder.

"Who knows this?" Skye asks.

It's a fair question.

"It's pretty classified. For obvious reasons. So I wouldn't have a hard time in the Academy. So Fury. And you. I'm guessing Garrett knew, maybe. Basically that's it."

"And my father."

"Yes, your father."

"That's what he was going after," Skye mutters.

"Sometimes I forget," he tells her.

"What?"

"I tried so hard not to think about it, for so many years, that sometimes I forget. I forget my father."

He realizes he still hasn't apologized.

Skye wraps her hand around his arm for comfort.

 

 

**5.**

In the comms room they detail a plan of contention.

"My father can't keep control anymore," Skye says. "It's not that he was very stable before. But he keeps messing with chemicals. He's looking for the perfect formula, he says. He thought he would make it more stable, but he's too far gone."

A solution, Coulson can understand that. But there's no solution to having lost your wife and child. And becoming a serial murderer is no solution at all.

"SHIELD could have helped," she says. "Your father, I mean. They didn't have to put him down."

"You know, when I was nine I used to think that the worse thing that could happen to me was that I turned out to stink at football, because then I wouldn't get picked by my dad's team in high school. Uh."

"I used to think my real parents would come to the orphanage and they wouldn't like my hair," she offers.

He chuckles.

They stay in silence for a moment. Companionable and easy. Most things between them are these days. Rapaired, recovered, renewed.

"It's time," she says.

This is not his fight.

So it's not exactly his solution.

He'll follow hers.

 

 

**6.**

_Her_ story ends up worse. Way worse. It's almost a pattern with Skye. She's the one who has to put him down, her own father. She doesn't just have to watch the whole thing go down. She's the murder weapon.

Coulson understands Skye is like him in many ways, that has always been their story; in other ways he regrets Skye had to surpass him.

"It's been a while since you've wanted to be here," he says that night, when he looks for her everywhere on the Playground and he finally finds her inside the Bus, tucked away in the cell, sitting on what used to be her bed for a while.

"Are you sure?" he asks bringing the chair close to her.

"I didn't want to risk it tonight," she says. "Just in case."

Coulson thinks, Not likely. She hasn't lost control in many months. But he can understand her being afraid of nightmares. He sometimes is afraid of nightmares too.

"Want to talk about it?"

She tilts her head.

"You know me well enough."

"That's a pass then," he says, giving up the chair and sitting on the bed with her.

"I can't believe it's over," she says. "I mean – I didn't want this to happen. I guess I'm an awful person for being a bit relieved it's over."

"Skye, your father has spent the better part of last year trying to control your fate and harming people around you. He did love you, but being tired of what he put you through... it doesn't make you a bad person."

"Just a _bad daughter_ , uh?"

He gives her a strained smile.

"I used to think I was a bad son. For not being able to help my father."

"That wasn't your responsibility," she says. "And I wasn't either. You didn't have to torture yourself for not being able to _fix_ my problem."

"Ah."

"You're an open book, Director."

He smiles again. He's pretty sure he's nowhere near that. She's just too sharp for him.

"Are you okay?" he asks.

Skye shrugs. Even for someone like Skye it's not a regular occassion, killing a father to protect a team.

"Could you stay with me tonight?" she asks him, pretty straightforward.

Later Coulson doesn't know how they managed the mechanics of it all. He just knows one moment Skye was asking him to stay and then next they were lying together in the tiny bed inside the cell, Coulson against the wall, his arms around Skye's waist, Skye pressed against his chest.

They have been growing pretty close lately – Coulson has needed her more than ever, with the new situation in SHIELD, its sudden growth – but nothing like this. He tries to remember the last time they touched. He tries to remember if Skye has touched anyone, outside the necessity of missions, since she came back, since she touched Coulson's arm that first night, her powers under controlled but greater and more dangerous than ever before.

The bed is too narrow but they find the best way.

Skye's hair is long again and he can press his face against its softness as they lie together. She doesn't seem to midn, she seems to welcome the touch. They are cuddling, there's not escaping that fact. Like lovers but not lovers, and Coulson remembers that he considered that a possibility, before everything started going to hell piece by piece.

"I had a dream about my father's death the other day," he tells her, the intimate confession of their embrace. "It was exactly how I remember, except when I run to his side it wasn't my father, it was you."

"That's... messed up."

"Well, yes."

She relaxes against him. Coulson tenses, a natural reaction, he thinks, hoping she doesn't notice. He hadn't considered these details when Skye asked him to stay.

"But I'm glad I'm not the only one with messed-up dreams," she says. "And I'm glad you're here."

"Of course."

She doesn't cry. (he did, but he was just a kid, and he could never be strong like Skye)

She remains calm, like she's just very tired.

Coulson wraps one arm lightly around her waist, trying to be comforting or supportive or merely just here.

"That's nice," she comments, a whisper between them.

She shifts against him, rubbing her ass against him. Is she doing it on purpose or just trying to get comfortable in this uncomfortable position? Coulson tries to resist the urge to roll his hips against the touch and knows he's fucked, damned, doomed.

He bites the inside of his cheek but his body doesn't care about his fears.

"Coulson."

He starts backing away, fearing she has noticed, shame washing over him. But Skye presses harder, her back against his chest. She calls his name again, softer, and he is no longer ashamed.

"Yes?" he says, almost dreamily.

"Please tell me I'm not going insane and you feel this, too."

He freezes.

"Also please tell me you know what I'm talking about."

"I know what you are talking about," he replies, in a whisper, shakily.

Skye presses her back against him, as one would take a deep breath, feeling everywhere they are touching. 

What he feels for Skye has been such a secret, sometimes even to himself, carrying it without noticing, and sometimes he forgets.

Now he remembers all the whys and hows.

She presses on, grinding against him, taking his hand in hers and pressing it against her chest. Coulson feels the heartbeat first, the kind of speed that would have signalled disaster months ago. But Skye can feel it all and not lose control. Coulson trusts the precision of her gift. No one ever told him he would fall in love with a natural disaster and he is glad he did, slipping his fingers under the neck of her t-shirt.

Reaching for her.

He always tries to reach for her.

Skye turns around in his arms, on her side and facing him, pressing her mouth against his. It feels strange that kissing is the second step, after he's felt her breast under his hand and her warmth against his groin. But it makes sense too. They are always rushing things, and everything ends up out of order. There's a surge in his chest, like a tickling inside his lungs, that tells him there'll never be enough air, like there'll never be enough kissing Skye. He opens his mouth, obscenely so, moaning when Skye slides his tongue against him, her hands bunching his shirt above his stomach, searching for him.

He searches for her too.

He has been searching for her. That's perhaps, the whole story.

"That's nice," Skye says into his mouth, when Coulson pushes his hand between her legs.

Coulson whimpers, word-less, struck dumb all of the sudden, Skye pushing one knee between his legs and against his hard-on, the narrow bed shrinking under their gigantic desires.

"Is it messed up that we're doing this because I remind you of your dead father?" Skye asks between kisses, but there's a hint of smirk there.

Coulson wants to touch her hair, but his hands are busy.

"Maybe," he says and tries to make his voice the equivalent of touching her hair, stroking her face. "I'm mainly doing this because I'm crazy about you."

The smirk appears in all its glory.

"Then it's fine. I don't mind a little messed up right now."

She kisses him again, throwing one leg over his hip, drawing him closer – undertow, he thinks, a conversation from long ago, but he never forgets the ones between them – and now his hands are between their bodies.

Coulson pushes back, trying to match her, knowing it's always impossible. He rubs his erection against the inside of her thigh while his fingers tease her over the fabric of her sweatpants.

She's lost her father today.

Maybe he should tell her he loves her.

"Skye," he calls.

"Yeah."

"I'm sorry," he says.

She bites his bottom lip and moves her hand to his back, feeling for his scar under the shirt. Right, Coulson thinks, he should show her his scars. He should have done that first.

Skye breaks the kiss and everything stops this time. She is panting and Coulson can tell she wants to say something.

"What?"

"Can we stop?" she asks.

Coulson nods, drawing his hand from between her legs and onto her stomach.

"Do you mind if we don't do the whole thing tonight?" she asks again.

Coulson chuckles, brushing his nose against Skye's mouth.

"What kind of question is that? Of course I don't."

He extricates himself from her a bit, taking his hand away completely. He misses the warmth under his fingers but he doesn't want Skye to rush something she's not ready for. She holds his hand, though, and he no longer misses the warmth. This is a different kind of warmth, and maybe he needs it more than a quick release in a too-narrow bed in the cell.

"I'm sorry," she says.

He shakes his hand, kissing her fingertips.

"I think I'm a bit too – wound up, I guess – to deal with this too. Because this is important," she tells him. "Very important."

"Okay," he says, not knowing what else to say. This is important, Skye doesn't want to mess it up. He could just cry. He's important to her. Very important.

She hugs him, wrapping her arms around his middle and pressing him against her chest. He's still hard, but it's not painful and unsatisfactory – well, it is, but it's also comfortable, pressing himself against Skye's hips and letting it ebb away under her.

He presses his face into the hollow of her neck and goes to sleep there, a whole continent of warmth in the middle of a narrow mattress.

 

 

**7.**

One thing he absolutely didn't remember was how cold the place got in this month.

For obvious reasons climate is not among his most vivid childhood memories.

It was Skye's impulsive decision, of course, to visit.

It is rare that they got a free day like this – what with rebuilding SHIELD again after everything, and the new agents, and Skye's own problems and alliances, always too much work and too little life – and she wanted to waste it visiting his hometown. Coulson would have preferred a night in a fancy hotel making love to her. But Skye promised they could stay in a little B&B on the way, so there was some sort of compromise.

He feels unsure about showing her his hometown.

"Now, this is a proper visit," she says.

"Yes."

"Without my father – rest in some kind of peace – trying to hold the whole town hostage."

"This is more relaxed, I agree."

Coulson doesn't know why he is here.

He doesn't get it.

It seems like a waste of time.

They look at the spot – the little metal circle on the street – which marks where the Sputnik fell. Skye thinks it's a strange story, even for a family romance. Not stranger than ours, Coulson thinks. There's no story stranger than ours.

"Why didn't you go to the high school where you father had taught?" Skye asks.

He shoves his hands into his pockets, the cold getting to him.

"Because my father had taught there."

"Oh. Then I guess you haven't played much football either."

"Not since I was nine."

They keep walking along the main road.

The old post office got a face-lift at some point. It's changed so much. Everything, really. The whole place could be another town entirely. He doesn't recognize much. Not something you can tell when you're busy fighting murderers on the Index and the nefarious intentions of your future-girlfriend's father. He only realizes now. It's all gone.

Nothing about this place feels his anymore.

Why are they even here?

Skye is kind of scrunching her face at what she sees.

"You like it?" he asks, feeling ridiculously shy. Skye is his partner, he doesn't have to impress her. Yet, he's nervous. This is more a part of himself than he originally thought.

"Not really," she says. He surprises himself by letting out a disappointed groan. "Don't get me wrong, it's _your_ hometown, of course I love it. But it's so... WASPy and whitebread."

"Sorry to disappoint you."

"On the contrary," she says, twirling around and grabbing Coulson by the waist. "If someone as interesting as Phillip J Coulson can come out of such a boring place then... maybe there's hope for the world."

He looks at her in awe.

"I know why I'm here," he tells her.

Skye is raising a questioning eyebrow, but she doesn't actually question him.

He'll tell her.

He'll tell her the whole story later. In the B&B, maybe, hopefully after much lovemaking.

Skye takes his hand, maybe because she's cold too, maybe because she no longer needs a reason to hold his hand like this.

Coulson looks around. He sees what Skye sees. The boring whitebread community. The eerie small-towness of it all. The cold and the trees and the postcard picture America.

But he is walking hand in hand with a woman so powerful she could probably split the planet in two someday, and if they were ever to tell it like a family romance in the future it would involve alien blood and strange cosmic preordination. Stars had to fall for them to meet, yes. But even in this town, even among its predictable line of houses and under the predictable clock tower and banners announcing the next farmer's market, even though he came from a place like this – even if he came from a man like his father – Skye loves him so maybe there's hope for him yet.

"Come on," Skye says, squeezing his hand. "You promised to show me the hospital where you were born."

"Why would you want to see that?"

"Never you mind. I just do. Come on."

 _Come on_. Coulson smiles at her: I know why _we_ are here.


End file.
